


As It Should Be

by lar_laughs



Series: Hobie's Life [1]
Category: Firefly, Jossverse
Genre: F/M, OOC present, Post BDM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-15
Updated: 2011-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-14 18:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lar_laughs/pseuds/lar_laughs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS for Firefly Comic Series!  Set several years after Wash's death.  Wash has a chance to come back and make things right.  The only problem is Zoe but a certain little girl is bound and determined to have two parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As It Should Be

“And there was much rejoicing in the land.” Several plastic dinosaurs leapt to their back feet. One of them tried to high five the other but ended up falling heavily , landing on his neck without making a sound. The rest of them continued cheering wildly as if they hadn’t noticed their brother’s sudden silence.

“Daddy. You dropped one.” Small hands righted the fallen dinosaur, patting him gently on the head before walking back to the swiveling captain’s chair. “Do it again.”

“Do what again? This?” A dinosaur stood on his head, doing a rather fancy pirouette using only his nostrils.

The little girl giggled, her dark eyes crinkling up as she covered her mouth with grimy hands. “No, Daddy. Make the dinosaurs cheer again. I like it when they cheer.”

“One last time and then you need to go take your nap. Your mother is going to fry my circuits if she finds out that you’re up on deck instead of in the cabin. Ready? “ A whisper of blue floated over the collection of dinosaurs and they all stood up once again. “There was great rejoicing in the land. Wait… I don’t hear them rejoicing. Perhaps they need your help, sweeting. Cheer for them, will you?”

“Hooray!” The small girl leapt to her feet, bouncing up and down on the chair. Even though it swiveled back and forth with an alarming arc, she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, it made the game all the better. “Hooray! Hooray! There was great rejoicing in the land! Rejoice! Rejoice! Hooray!”

“Hobie? Are you on the bridge again?”

The little girl stilled. “ _Gui_!”

“Hobie,” Wash hissed, a fissure of solid lines spiraling through his pixeled form. “Where did you learn that word?”

“From you, Daddy.” She had the good graces to blush even though she didn’t drop her dark eyes. Zoe had instilled a stiff spine in this little one even though she wasn’t yet four. Life would do her few favors, especially as she was a child on board of Serenity, a ship that still prowled through space looking for the next transaction paying decently enough to put food on the table.

“Don’t dare you say it in front of your mother or she’ll install locks on the cabin that even Kaylee won’t be able to teach you to unlock. Now go. And try not to put your chin up when you lie. It’s your tell. Remember that, sweeting. Work on your tells or they won’t work for you.”

Hobie saluted with three tiny fingers, her grin definitely the product of her father’s genes. “Yes, Daddy. I’ll keep my chin down.”

“Hobie!” Zoe stood in the hatch, her hands on her hips. “I thought we’d talked about you coming up here to the bridge. This isn’t the place for a small child.”

“I’m not a small child, Mummy. I’m a little girl. And little girls can be on the bridge if they have an adult with them. The Captain says so.” She climbed down from the Captain’s chair, her tiny hands pulling at her mother’s shirt. “Ask him. He’ll tell you. That’s what he said.”

Zoe stood completely still, her hands folded over her chest as if she was bartering for a shipment of medical supplies instead of listening to her daughter’s pleas. “And what adult is with you?”

“Daddy is here, Mummy. See? He’s an adult.” She pointed over her shoulder at the life-sized projection of the pilot of the Serenity.

Zoe’s lips thinned. “This is not your Daddy, Hobie. This is a project that Kaylee thought would be fun to experiment with but didn’t think to ask me about first. Your Daddy is dead. We’ve talked about this.”

A tear slipped out of the corner of Hobie’s eye without her permission. She wiped at it angrily. “His body is dead but this is the rest of him. Kaylee says so. And she should know.”

“And why is she suddenly an expert on where the soul goes to rest after a body has passed on? Jing cai. That girl will be the death of me.” Zoe reached down to pick up her daughter, laying her lips on the little girl’s forehead. “I’ll admit that the projection looks just like your Daddy and he acts just like your Daddy but it’s not your Daddy.”

For the first time, she looked directly into the eyes of the projection. Kaylee had done a very good job, indeed. It tore her heart to see his hurt expression as she discredited him to her daughter. But he should have cared because he was nothing but a few blips in the ships main computer.

Without a crack in her quivering voice, she hugged her daughter tightly to her but kept her gaze on the image of the man she had loved more than life and lost much too early. “Hoban Washburne was a living, breathing man who wouldn’t have wanted to be made into nothing but a beam of light. He loved life too much to make a mockery of it.”

“But Mummy-“

“No. You won’t come up here again, Hobie. Do you hear me? No more.” On feet that couldn’t move fast enough, Zoe ran down the corridor, her daughter crying as if her heart was breaking.

~~~~

“Kaylee, I need you to change my face.”

“Excuse me?” The ship’s mechanic looked up from the section of the engine she was cleaning. She’d built the program Wash operated off so that he could be on the bridge or the engine room. It hadn’t seemed right to only have the program work in one area when there was such a big ship even though the Captain had asked that he not be able to pop up wherever, potentially scaring the crew with his ghost like visage. They’d had a long talk about how she needed to be able to work in peace and quiet, though. Wash only came to visit when he had something on his mind.

“A new face. Zoe can barely stand to look at me. It’s too much for her. Her pain means that Hobie is in pain and I can’t bear that.”

“Really?” Kaylee stepped toward Wash, her hand outstretched as if she could pat him on the shoulder. “You can feel her pain?”

“Of course, I can.” His face was a mask of his own private grief in the affair. “And I don’t want this to go on. I’ve probably given Hobie enough Daddy issues for at least a year’s worth of counseling. I’m hurting my daughter and my…” but he couldn’t say the word. Just as she couldn’t look at him.

“Giving you a face won’t change anything. Can’t you see that? You’ll still be you.”

“But Hobie can learn to think of me as someone else. There’s still time for her to forget me. Forget what I looked like. I could be… Uncle Ralph.”

“And you think Zoe will be able to call you Uncle Ralph?” She was unaccustomed to being a therapist but there weren’t many others who could talk to Wash like she could. Even Simon thought it was rather creepy to talk to what amounted to a machine. But she saw the humanity in him. There was no way she could make a machine feel like Wash did right now. That wasn’t part of her programming. And this whole project hadn’t been her idea to begin with. She’d been the architect to give him a projection but that was where her expertise ended. Let the others think this was her doing. She’d only done what he’d requested. Just like she would do what he requested now even though she thought he was kuang zhe de.

Wash’s image shrugged. “I don’t care what she calls me as long as she can look me in the eyes. It’s killing me, Kaylee. I feel like I’m dying all over again. I thought I could do this. Finding out about my daughter was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. I was willing to do anything to be in her life. But this… I can’t hurt Zoe. Not like this.”

Kaylee could only nod. How could she argue against that sort of logic? “I’ll see what I can do. Give me until tomorrow, though. I told the Captain I’d have that stutter in the turning mechanism worked out before we tried to dock. Knowing the Captain, he could take a yin to land and I’d be in a heap of trouble for not doing my job.”

“Fine. Just… give it some thought.”

~~~~

Serenity was drifting, set on her course but not moving purposefully through space as she often did. The pilot was in his chair, doing what it was that he did best. At this point, it was the only thing he did. Not that he minded. Flying was all he’d ever really wanted to do.

The middle of the night was the time that Wash truly felt alone but it was also the time when he could watch the stars and imagine that he was more than he was. That he could look at them and dream again. There was so much space out there. So many different places he’d wanted to see. Soil he’d wanted to walk on. Air he’d hoped to one day breathe.

But now his existence was this view right here. It wasn’t such a bad thing. Hobie’s visits had broken up the monotony of the stars, given him something to think about when he was alone like this. She was getting so big, turning into a little lady right in front of him. He couldn’t believe that he’d been a part of such an amazing person. And no matter what had happened that had brought him to this place, he wouldn’t have changed a thing.

“Wash?”

His eyes closed in pain at the way she pronounced his name. The hand on the console flickered as the computer struggled to keep up with the surge of emotion. He stood up, turning toward the hatch where she stood once again. How many other times has she leaned there with her hip against the frame, her eyes dark orbs with a passion hidden just below the surface? As now, she’d always had her arms crossed as if she wanted him to give her a reason to drop her guard. His Zoe had a deep well of emotions that not everyone got to see. But he’d seen her tears as well as heard her laughter. She was his wife.

She had been his wife, he corrected himself. He was a series of computer blips projected into an enclosed space. They didn’t let you keep a marriage certificate if you couldn’t hold it in your hand.

“Zoe. I was thinking everyone was asleep.”

“They are.”

He’d hoped for more time but this was to be their big scene. His only wish was that she went easy on his heart. “I’m sorry about earlier. She likes to hear stories about the dinosaurs.”

“Has she been coming up here long?”

“Mal brought her once. She wanted to see how the ship stayed in the air and he took her on a tour of the engine room. This was his final stop. She asked who I was. He told her.”

Zoe stepped into the space, settling her hand on the back of the Captain’s chair as she’d often done in the old days. “I would have appreciated if someone had told me what my daughter was up to. It fair gives me the chills to think she might be up to mischief that could knock us out of the sky.”

“I’d never let that happen.”

“What?” She glared, a mother bear with a cub just learning to leave the cave. “You’d never let her get into mischief? Or that you’d fly us out of a mishap. I’d like to see that, Hoban Washburne. The last time I remember, you flew us to your death.”

He flinched. “I deserve that.”

“You deserve a lot more than that.” Just as his daughter had fought against her tears earlier, Zoe screwed up her face but a trail of moisture still wandered from the corner of her eye. “How could you leave me like that? Just when things were looking up for us. And now this. I have to be reminded constantly that you don’t exist anymore.”

“But I do.”

She lashed out at him, her upper cut meeting exactly where his chin would have been if he’d been flesh and blood. It was a perfect recreation of the moment he’d realized how much he loved her. “You. Aren’t. Real.” Each word was punctuated by a punch at nothing.

“I don’t have a body that needs to be nourished or sleep. But that doesn’t mean I’m not real. I have all my memories, just like you do.”

“And do you think those memories comfort me at night when I cry myself to sleep, wondering how I’m going to raise Hobie all by my lonesome. What if I’m not fit to be a mother? What if I can’t raise her the way she deserves to be raised?” Her legs gave out from under her so that she collapsed to the metal floor. With her hands over her face, she sobbed as she hadn’t done since the moments after Wash’s funeral when she’d given herself over to the emotions she’d bottled in for so long.

“Ai ya tian a. I never wanted to hurt you this way. Zoe… baby. Please stop crying. Please.” There was nothing he could do but kneel down beside her, his hands helplessly out before him. “I’ll make this better. I’ve talked to Kaylee. She’s going to give me a different face. I won’t have to hurt you anymore.”

She looked up suddenly, her wet face reflecting his pixels. “A what?”

“A different face. I don’t have to look like this. It’ll just be some facial reconstruction. You won’t have to be reminded anymore.”

“If I was able, Wash, I do believe I’d slap you across the face.”

Wash was taken aback. “What? What did I say? I thought this would help.”

“You think me that stupid to be fooled by a different face? And what of Hobie? What would it do to her to have a father without his real face?”

“I could be… Uncle Ralph.”

That brought out the chuckle that he hadn’t heard in awhile. Her smile twisted up to the wry grin he’d cherished for so long. “Bi zui. You could never pull off being a Ralph. A Frank, perhaps. But you’re no Ralph. No matter what face you wear.”

“But I’d do it for you. If it made this all better somehow.”

Another few tears slipped out. “What would make it better is to have you back.”

He sat down, pulling his knees up so they were sitting side by side. “I can’t hold you anymore but I can still be here for you. To talk. You know, about the stuff that you need to get out. That you’re worried about. You used to love talking to me.”

Zoe mimicked his posture, settling back against the control panel. “I did love hearing you try to make our problems all go away with a simple joke. And I have missed your smile.”

“As I’ve missed yours, bao bei.” They sat in silence for several moments, reacquainting themselves with each other’s face. “Tell me about Hobie. She reminds me so much of you.”

“And she reminds me of you. Her sense of humor is all yours.”

They chuckled and laughed their way through stories old and new as the stars looked on. And off to the right, one of them winked as if to say, _As it should be_.


End file.
